Questions you should ask before pursuing a career in digital marketing

27 Apr Questions you should ask before pursuing a career in digital marketing

Digital marketing in an exciting part of the marketing landscape that is constantly evolving to meet the behaviours and trends amongst internet users and the search engines they rely on. Certain disciplines of digital marketing like search engine marketing (SEM) and subsequently search engine optimisation (SEO), are highly fluid areas of study that require practitioners to apply their broader knowledge or marketing rather than following a dogmatic approach.

A career in digital marketing can be particularly enticing to people who dismiss it as Facebook or social media marketing, thinking of it as a cushy job. The reality is however that digital marketing can be an incredibly hard industry to get a start and be successful in unless you’re the right kind of person.

Let’s take a look at some questions you should be asking yourself before pursuing a career in digital marketing.

Do you have good writing and English skills?

A large part of digital marketing revolves around generating high quality content for the purposes of being shared commercially in order to drive traffic to a client’s website. This type of soft-copy advertising and sponsored content is the bread and butter of a lot of contemporary digital marketing strategy and will be a requirement of most digital marketing roles.

Many entry level digital marketing roles will be offered to copywriters. A good copywriter can write high quality and engaging content at a commercial scale, meaning that they can produce several articles every day for a variety of different clients.

Are you a good communicator?

While communications degrees have been dismissed or misunderstood in popular culture, they are actually the best education you can get to become a digital marketer. This is because marketing is all about communicating a message to an audience in an effective way.

Contemporary communicators have a great understanding of social media and how it’s changed the landscape of digital marketing over the last decade. These people will often be quite popular on social media, having an intrinsic knowledge of what kind of posts do well.

Are you a patient person?

Because the internet is such a large and constantly expanding behemoth, it can be hard for digital marketing campaigns to take off. Unless you create the next viral hit, a campaign is going to have to spend a long time fighting for relevancy amongst other similar offerings.

This means that a lot of digital marketing work will require you to wait for results over a longer period than with traditional advertising campaigns. Implementing and committing to proven strategies as well as being patient is the best way to garner long-term results.